“Sleep No More,” the new avant-garde interactive play, is currently playing to sold-out crowds in Chelsea. In some ways, to be honest, it’s best for the audience to go in knowing as little as possible.

Set in the restored historic McKittrick hotel on West 27th Street, audiences are let in staggered sets over an hour, and then given masks to wear throughout the show. Once inside the hotel, audience members are encouraged to explore, seek, dig and follow. Go rustle the vintage clothes in the closet. Rifle through the books in the library. Wander into rooms that unexpectedly turn into mazes.

The effect is something like “Eyes Wide Shut” meets scavenger hunt.

The line between audience and players is razor-thin and is constantly renegotiated. Actors in 30s-era costumes wander between rooms, engaging in everything from the banal (endlessly arranging items on desks) to the height of drama (brawls, murders, lovers’ quarrels). The silent, white-masked audience is tasked with seeking out their own narrative in an unfamiliar world, like nosy, clumsy ghosts trying out a new mansion to haunt. If the audience is inside the stage space at all times, then they are also part of the performance as well, trailing after actors like lost ducklings or forming impassive circles as actors mime, dance and mutter lines.

British theater company Punchdrunk has lavished care on the site-specific set dressing and sound design. Spaces, which range from parlors and bedrooms to a candy shop and a detective’s office, suggest the off-kilter, spooky and slightly claustrophobic design aesthetic of the mad and the depressed. Given that there is remarkably little dialogue, sound and lighting design provide many audience cues.

Alick Crossley / Sleep No More

Tori Sparks (center) with audience members.

While the plot is a loose interpretation of Macbeth, the plot points are almost incidental. Because the action is continously unfurling over six stories, it is by design hard, perhaps even impossible, to catch all of it. The actors are on some kind of looped script so that the audience has a chance to witness scenes more than once, but at its root, the experience is structured by the choices one makes as a voyeur. Stay in the nightclub and see what happens next, or run after the lady in the sequin dress?

One can argue that the performance never entirely ends; or rather, the closing coda takes place in the hotel bar, where friends recount what they each saw. If there is something that can disappoint in this production, it’s asking your friends if they also thought that the spectacular [redacted thing] was the highlight of the night and watching their eyes grow big and then disappointed when they realize they somehow missed it.

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